contemplating the intersection of work, the global economy, and Christian mission

Mar 09, 2017

Ben Carson touched off a firestorm this week when he referred to slaves as immigrants. (Barak Obama has done the same several times.) The uproar has been that equating slavery and immigration minimizes the horrors of slavery. I have engaged in a number of social media discussions on this topic. At the crux of the matter is volition. Are people brought to a place against their will immigrants? Merriam Webster Dictionary:

Immigrant - “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.”

Volition is not part of the definition. As any demographer will tell you, populations grow (or decline) via three factors: births, deaths, and migration. When looking at a particular locale, people who come to that locale are immigrants. People who go from that locale to another are emigrants. Births and immigration grow the population. Deaths and emigration shrink it. It is a closed system. Volition is not part of the equation.

I am in agreement with concerns about minimizing slavery and I worry that statements by Carson and Obama risk doing that. As Jemar Tisby writes, a generous reading of Carson’s characterization is that “African slaves endured unimaginable hardship to carve out a life for themselves and their descendants.” I think that was indeed the intent but it is challenging. Framing slaves as rough equivalents of people who bought a ticket on a boat to come to America in search of a better life minimizes slavery. Both were immigrants but with very very different stories. The desire to present African-Americans as other than simply victims while embracing the horrors of slavery is a tough needle to thread in the space of a few words as both these men were trying to do.

The progressives believed, first and foremost, in the importance of science and scientific experts in guiding the economy, government, and society. Against the selfishness, disorder, corruption, ignorance, conflict and wastefulness of free markets or mass democracy, they advanced the ideal of disinterested, public-spirited social control by well-educated elites. The progressives were technocrats who, Leonard observes, “agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.” Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction.

Later, she writes:

Advocates similarly didn’t deny that imposing a minimum wage might throw some people out of work. That wasn’t a bug; it was a feature -- a way to deter undesirable workers and keep them out of the marketplace and ideally out of the country. Progressives feared that, faced with competition from blacks, Jews, Chinese, or other immigrants, native-stock workingmen would try to keep up living standards by having fewer kids and sending their wives to work. Voilà: “race suicide.” Better to let a minimum wage identify inferior workers, who might be shunted into institutions and sterilized, thereby improving the breed in future generations. ...

... Clark’s theory is now a foundation of mainstream labor economics. In his day, however, it was highly unpopular. “A key element of resistance,” writes Leonard, “was that many progressives were reluctant to treat wages as a price,” rather than a right of citizenship and social standing. Informed by their beliefs in scientific racism, most progressives preferred wages to favor some groups over others: men over women, whites over blacks, and most prominently, native stock over immigrants.

Although they generally assumed black inferiority, progressives outside the South didn’t worry much about the “Negro question.” They were instead obsessed with the racial, economic, and social threats posed by immigrants. MIT president Francis Amasa Walker called for “protecting the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe," whom he described in Darwinian language as “representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.”

So restricting immigration was as central to the progressive agenda as regulating railroads. Indeed, in his five-volume History of the American People, Wilson lumped together in one long paragraph the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act as “the first fruits of radical economic changes and the rapid developments of trade, industry, and transportation” -- equal harbingers of the modern administrative state. With a literacy test and ban on most other Asian immigrants enacted in 1917 and national quotas established in 1924, the progressives bequeathed to America the concept of illegal immigration.

The first paragraph is preface for what follows. It relates why I eschew the label "progressive" despite having some sympathies for some aspects of what today's progressives espouse. In my estimation, "progressivism," then and now, contains substantial hubris - believing that through dispassionate logic, science, and a superior moral locus, we are justified in moving heaven and earth to bring about a brave new world. Institutions and practices that have emerged through time as practical ways of making the world work be damned! I believe most change should be modest reform, not revolution. It is in this sense that I would claim the term conservative. We want to conserve the good as we seek improvement. We aren't that smart and we aren't that noble, when it comes to redesigning the world.

The minimum wage piece is particularly interesting. While impacts of minimum wage increases art notoriously complex and difficult to summarize with precision, most economists agree that substantial increases in the minimum wage dampen job growth overtime. There are studies that show, just as the early progressives logically surmised, that increased minimum wages have a negative impact on the employment of minorities, particularly young black men.

Jun 26, 2014

"We are pleased to announce a brand new course at MRUniversity, Everyday Economics. The new course will cover some of the big ideas in economics but applied to everyday questions. The first section, premiering now and rolling out over the next several weeks, features Don Boudreaux on trade. Tyler will appear in a future section on food. You can expect more from me as well. Indeed, you may spot both Tyler and I in some cameos (ala Stan Lee) in some of Don’s videos!

Here’s the first video on trade and the hockey stick of human prosperity."

May 29, 2014

I just read Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages by Frances & Joseph Gies. The book focuses on technological development during the 1,000 years from 500-1500 C.E. The Middle Ages were once cast as an age of regression from the golden age of Greece and Rome until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment saved the day. Furthermore, capitalism is often seen as a product of the last two or three centuries. Modern scholarship debunks these characterizations. This book does a great job at showing the cultural and technological ferment of the Middle Ages, as well as showing how many of the key components of the modern economic world (companies, risk management, double-entry bookkeeping, finance, technological innovation, labor specialization, factories, to name a few) were already coming to flower by 1500. Here are two insights from the end of the book:

… “Asian priority in a wide range of [technological] innovations is established. Asia, however, showed little inclination to borrow, and so, after giving much to others, allowed its own technology to wither, as demonstrated in the history of the two epoch-making inventions of printing and firearms. Each originated in China, but each was allowed to languish, while Europe seized them in both hands to make them major instruments of change. An authority [Timo Myllyntaus] on technology transfer in the modern world asserts that the process ‘is not just a matter of moving some piece of hardware from one place to another… A material infrastructure is not enough. There must also be sufficient nonmaterial infrastructure.’ In the ‘nonmaterial infrastructure’ of medieval Europe was a spirit of progress whose ingredients included intellectual curiosity, a love of tinkering, an ambition ‘to serve God’ and also ‘to grow rich as all men desire to do.’

A sense of progress implies a sense of history, something missing among the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. ‘Lacking any objective understanding of the past – that is, lacking history,’ says [D. S. L.] Cardwell, ‘the hierarchical and slave-owning societies of classical antiquity failed to appreciate the great progress that had been achieved by and through technics.’ On the contrary, the ancients were fond of looking back to what they conceived as a vanished ‘golden age,’ a conception the reverse of progress. The Christian Church, whose pioneering monastic orders made many practical and material contributions to medieval technology, also supplied a noncyclical, straight-line view of history that allowed scope for the idea of progress.” (287-288)

The book concludes with this paragraph:

“’Technology,’ says Melvin Kranzberg, founder of the Society for the History of Technology, ‘is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’ It is what each age and each society make of it. The Middle Ages used it sometimes wisely, sometimes recklessly, often for dubious purposes, seldom with a thought for the future, and with only a dim awareness of the scientific and mathematical laws governing it. But operating on instinct, insight, trial and error, and perseverance, the craftsman and craftswoman, the entrepreneurs, the working monks and the clerical intellectuals, and the artist-engineers all transformed the world, on balance very much to the world’s advantage.” (291)

I've read a number of books on the history of technology. This is one of the best short surveys I have read, reading more like a novel than a history book.

Dec 27, 2013

... Second, the empirical evidence disproving Weber’s connection between Protestantism and the emergence of capitalism is considerable. Even Catholic critics of modern capitalism have had to concede that “the commercial spirit” preceded the Reformation by at least two hundred years. From the eleventh century onward, the words Deus enim et proficuum (“For God and Profit”) began to appear in the ledgers of Italian and Flemish merchants. This was not a medieval version of some type of prosperity gospel. Rather, it symbolized just how naturally intertwined were the realms of faith and commerce throughout the world of medieval Europe. The pursuit of profit, trade, and commercial success dominated the life of the city-states of medieval and Renaissance Northern Italy and the towns of Flanders, not to mention the Venetian republic that exerted tremendous influence on merchant activity throughout the Mediterranean long before 1517.

Since Weber’s time, much scholarly work has been done to illustrate the advanced state of market-driven economic development in the Middle Ages. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Belgian scholar Raymond de Roover penned numerous articles illustrating that, during the Middle Ages, financial transactions and banking started to take on the degree of sophistication that is commonplace today. Likewise, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, by the Italian-American historian of medieval European economic history, the late Robert S. Lopez, shattered the historical claims that formed much of the background of Weber’s argument. Lopez demonstrated in great detail the way in which the Middle Ages “created the indispensable material and moral conditions for a thousand years of virtually uninterrupted growth.”

In recent decades, the historians Edwin Hunt and James Murray have illustrated just how much the medieval period was characterized by remarkable innovation in methods of business organization. They also suggest that the advent of modernity actually heralded the expansion of state economic intervention and regulation in an effort to constrain economic freedom. In a similar fashion, the sociologist Rodney Stark has gathered together disparate sources of historical and economic analysis to illustrate the origins of capitalism and major breakthroughs in the theory and practice of wealth creation in the medieval period. Central to Stark’s analysis is his highlighting of the way pre-Reformation Western Christianity saw the world as one in which humans were called upon to use their reason and innate creativity to develop its resources—including economically.

Here one could add that, before Adam Smith, some of the most elaborate thinking about the nature of contracts, free markets, interest, wages, and banking that developed after the Reformation was articulated in the writings of Spanish Catholic scholastic thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Theologians such as Francisco de Vitoria OP, Martín de Azpilcueta, Juan de Mariana SJ, and Tomás de Mercado OP, anticipated many of the claims made by Smith two centuries later.

To be sure, much of this thinking occurred by way of side-effect rather than as a result of the systematic analysis undertaken by Smith. For as commercial relationships expanded throughout Europe in the centuries preceding and following the Reformation, there was a marked increase in the number of penitents asking their confessors for guidance about moral questions with a strong economic dimension. What was the just price? When was a person no longer obliged to adhere to a contract? When was charging interest legitimate? When did it become usurious? As a result, priests looked to theologians for guidance on how to respond to their penitents’ questions. Thus, as Jürg Niehans stressed in his History of Economic Theory:

The scholastics thus found it necessary to descend from theology into the everyday world of economic reality, of early capitalism, foreign trade, monopoly, banking, foreign exchange and public finance. What one knew about these things in the School of Salamanca was hardly less than Adam Smith knew two hundred years later, and more than most students know today.

Even when we consider modern capitalism’s emergence, a direct connection between this event and Protestantism is very open to question. ...

Nov 08, 2013

The printing press was nominated by 10 of our 12 panelists, five of
whom ranked it in their top three. Dyson described its invention as the
turning point at which “knowledge began freely replicating and quickly
assumed a life of its own.”

2. Electricity, late 19th century

And then there was light—and Nos. 4, 9, 16, 24, 28, 44, 45, and most of the rest of modern life.

3. Penicillin, 1928

Accidentally discovered in 1928, though antibiotics were not widely
distributed until after World War II, when they became the silver bullet
for any number of formerly deadly diseases ...

Sep 03, 2013

"A FEW centuries ago it would have been difficult to tell Europe apart
from the rest of the world—in economic terms, at least. Indeed, half a
millenium ago Europe might justly have been considered a laggard. The
three inventions which, in the words of Karl Marx, “ushered in bourgeois
society” were not invented in Europe. Gunpowder, the compass and the
printing press were probably all invented in China.

But by the
19th century, things were rather different. Western Europe and parts of
North America had become fabulously wealthy. Almost everywhere else was
horribly poor. Economic historians refer to this as the “Great
Divergence”. ..."

I'll add that failure to seriously wrestle with what is going on here and incorporating that into theological implications for work, addressing poverty, and general ethics, is one of the biggest reasons the church finds itself unable to address current issues in constructive ways. Ideologies of Western supremacy or Western exploitation as the driving features are insufficient.

Aug 27, 2013

Gavin Kennedy at Adam Smith's Lost Legacy has another excellent post on misconceptions about Adam Smith: Five Errors About Adam Smith and Classical Political Economy. He quotes an article that appeared in the Grand Island Independent by Lee Elliott and then shows five errors the author makes based on widely circulated myths. I don't know the political persuasion of the author, but his case is similar to the case I hear from many progressives as they critique Smith on the way to critiquing capitalism. Here is the pertinent part of the article:

“There has been a fascinating struggle going on within the field of economics since the 1970s.

Historically, economics has been known as the “dismal” science because of its ruthless belief that people are motivated solely by their financial interests. This came from Adam Smith’s notion that if all of us act selfishly, then an “invisible hand” will guide the creation of the best society possible.

There is a flaw. Smith recognized there was a feature of human character that just didn’t fit this idea. That feature is altruism.

He said we do things for others even though we derive nothing from it except for the pleasure of caring for others. It just doesn’t seem to fit classic economic theory. It also was almost impossible to measure. As a result, economists dropped the idea that we’re altruistic.

In fact, there is a second flaw. Classic economics assumes we are consistently rational. We’re not. In fact, it has been demonstrated that, at times, we are quite irrational but we are consistent in our irrationality.”

Kennedy goes into detail but in short A) the "dismal science" label came from Thomas Carlye in 1849, with
his opposition to abolition of slavery promoted by economists who saw people
as equal and deserving of liberty (read more here), B) Smith wrote positively about the importance of altruism but understood it alone to be insufficient for a sustainable economy, C) Smith used the "invisible hand" metaphor twice in the Wealth of Nations, neither time to refer to markets as a magically directing us to the best possible society, and D) the idea of homo economicus, the human being as nothing more than machines calculating utility, didn't emerge until a century after Smith's work. Read Kennedy's whole article.

My point is that whatever legitimate points Elliott has to make about modern economics (and I think he has valid points) he severely undermines his credibility by butchering the facts about the history of the position he critiques. Like so many others, he takes at face value the appropriation of Adam Smith by some modern conservatives to justify their positions. Critiquing the fiction as fact places the critic in the same camp as his or her targets. Both camps demonstrate that they are not serious about a historically rooted conversation, but rather use fiction to buttress ideological views they arrived at by other than historical analysis. A reliable critic would first unmask the false appropriations of Smith then target what they believe to be erroneous about modern economic conceptions. If critics of modern economics would actually read Smith, I think they would be quite surprised at how much of a neoclassical neoconservative he was not.

Jun 26, 2013

... What explains this longevity? Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Charles O’Reilly calls
it "organizational ambidexterity": the ability of a company to manage
its current business while simultaneously preparing for changing
conditions. "You often see successful organizations failing, and it's
not obvious why they should fail," O’Reilly says. The reason, he says,
is that a strategy that had been successful within the context of a
particular time and place may suddenly be all wrong once the world
changes.

Staying competitive, then, means changing what you're doing. But the
change can't be an abrupt switch from old to new — from print to digital
distribution, say, or from selling products to selling services — if
that means abandoning a business that's still profitable. Hence the call
for ambidexterity. You can't just choose between exploiting your
current opportunities and exploring new ones; you have to do both. And
the companies that last for decades are able to do so time and time
again. ...

I think there is a message for congregations and denominations as well.

Jun 14, 2013

... Consider what Adam Smith states early in
Wealth Of Nations about “self-interest”:

"In civilized society he stands at all times in need of the co–operation and
assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to
gain the friendship of a few persons. In almost every other race of animals
each individual, when it is grown up to maturity, is intirely independent, and
in its natural state has occasion for the assistance of no other living
creature. But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren,
and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only.6 He will be more likely to prevail if he can
interest their self–love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own
advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a
bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you
shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is
in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those
good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the
butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their
regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but
to their self–love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their
advantages” (WN I.ii.2: 26-27).

Read the above carefully. To obtain our self-interests of obtaining the ingredients of our dinner (or whatever), we must persuade the “butcher, brewer, and baker” to
supply them to us. Insisting on
our self-interest as imagined by the lonesome image of the Hollywood scriptwriter
would not secure our dinner (or
anything else) for us. We must
persuade them to supply us; not demand they meet our needs. What about their
needs? What do they do? Just say in response: “yes, sir, no
sir, three bags full sir”?

Indeed, Smith underlines that point by insisting that
we must address “their self–love, and never talk to them of our own necessities
but of their advantages”. In
short, we mediate our different self-interests by taking into account the self-interests
of others. This is the exact opposite
of Arturo Cuenllas’s presentation.

An egoistic non-cooperator would soon starve. ...

Yogi Berra once said, "I didn't really say all the things I said." Smith has to be the Yogi Berra of economists. Misunderstanding Adam Smith's ideas about "self-interest" can only be second to misunderstanding his two passing references to an "invisible hand" in The Wealth of Nations.

Jun 04, 2013

One of my favorite niche economics blogs is Gavin Kennedys' Adam Smith's Lost Legacy. Many of his posts go after people using Adam Smith's "invisible hand" metaphor. He tirelessly points out that Smith used the metaphor only twice in the Wealth of Nations, and on neither occasion was it used to describe the economics in the way attributed to Smith by economists in the second of half of the Twentieth Century. But his larger concern is rampant illiteracy about Smith, but also about our economic past in general. He recently encountered someone who wants to replace the "invisible hand" with the "invisible heart." Here is part of his response in his post Need for Historical Perspective on Poverty.

... It seems to be another blueprint to save the world from the only
phenomenon called ‘capitalism' that has raised millions from poverty to
standards of living beyond anything achieved in previous millennia, including
the frightful poverty experiences of Soviet-style communism.

Much of the ancient curse of poverty persists
in large geographical spaces of the world affecting billions of people, though
the total numbers living on $1 a day has diminished at an historical high also
by a billion or so since the 1960s.
The poor in the richer countries have lower standards than the very
rich, but those poor are incomparably richer than the richest minority living
in the millennia before the change from agriculture and primitive commercial
markets, including the richest Emperors, Kings, War Lords and Conquerors. I

It would help if those who seek to “tackle the
problem of poverty” for the very best of humanitarian reasons, like Terry
Hallman and Sir Ronald Cohen, and many others, would get some historical
perspectives on the relative scale of human poverty over the last 1,000 years. ...

Apr 11, 2013

Jerry Muller is one of my favorite economic historians. I think this piece offers an insightful analysis of inequality in advanced market economies. As I read this piece I kept thinking back to Robert Fogel's (another favorite economic historian) The Fourth Great Awkening and the Future of Egalitarianism, where he makes the case that the economic challenge of this century is going to be focused on human capital. I don't think the ideologies of the left or right have come to grips with this yet. Muller begins:

Inequality is increasing almost everywhere in the post-industrial
capitalist world. Despite what many think, this is not the result of
politics, nor is politics likely to reverse it. The problem is more
deeply rooted and intractable than generally recognized.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and
expanding equality of opportunity only increases it -- because some
individuals, families, and communities are simply better able than
others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that
today's capitalism affords. Some of the very successes of western
capitalist societies in expanding access and opportunity, combined with
recent changes in technology and economics, have contributed to
increasing inequality. And at the nexus of economics and society is the
family, the changing shape and role of which is an often overlooked
factor in the rise of inequality.

Though capitalism has opened up ever more opportunities for the
development of human potential, not everyone has been able to take full
advantage of those opportunities or to progress very far once they have
done so.

Formal or informal barriers to equality of opportunity, for example,
have historically blocked various sectors of the population -- such as
women, minorities, and poor people -- from benefiting fully from all
capitalism offers. But over time, in the advanced capitalist world,
those barriers have gradually been lowered or removed, so that now
opportunity is more equally available than ever before. The inequality
that exists today arguably derives less from the unequal availability of opportunity than it does from the unequal ability to exploit opportunity.

And that unequal ability, in turn, stems from differences in the
inherent human potential that individuals begin with and in the ways
that families and communities enable and encourage that human potential
to flourish. ...

Mar 23, 2013

... Different languages have different ways of talking about the future.
Some languages, such as English, Korean, and Russian, require their
speakers to refer to the future explicitly. Every time English-speakers
talk about the future, they have to use future markers such as “will” or
“going to.” In other languages, such as Mandarin, Japanese, and German,
future markers are not obligatory. The future is often talked about
similar to the way present is talked about and the meaning is understood
from the context. A Mandarin speaker who is going to go to a seminar
might say “Wo qu ting jiangzuo,” which translates to “I go listen
seminar.” Languages such as English constantly remind their speakers
that future events are distant. For speakers of languages such as
Mandarin future feels closer. As a consequence, resisting immediate
impulses and investing for the future is easier for Mandarin speakers. ...

“Capitalism has a purpose beyond just making money. I think the critics of capitalism have got it in this very small box. That it’s all about money. It’s based in being greedy, selfish and exploitative. And yet, I haven’t found it to be that way. Most of the hundreds of entrepreneurs I know and have met did not start their business primarily out of a desire to make money. Not that there’s anything wrong with making money. My body cannot function unless it produces red-blood cells. No red-blood cells and I’m a dead man. But that’s not the purpose of my life.

Similarly, a business cannot exist unless it produces a profit . . . but that’s not the only reason it exists.”

When I was writing a review of Dwight Lee's and Richard McKenzie's excellent book, Getting Rich in America: 8 Simple Rules for Building a Fortune and a Satisfying Life,
I called Dwight to ask a question and we got talking about Rule #5: Get
Married and Stay Married. Dwight pointed out that if you follow the
other 7 rules but don't get married or stay married, you have a
substantial probability of building a fortune and a satisfying life.
But, he said, if you don't get married and stay married, you tend not to
follow at least some of the other 7 rules.

... A useful debate about the morality of capitalism must get beyond libertarian nostrums that greed is good, what’s mine is mine and whatever the market produces is fair. It should also acknowledge that there is no moral imperative to redistribute income and opportunity until everyone has secured a berth in a middle class free from economic worries. If our moral obligation is to provide everyone with a reasonable shot at economic success within a market system that, by its nature, thrives on unequal outcomes, then we ought to ask not just whether government is doing too much or too little, but whether it is doing the right things.

Instead, Dr. Butzer argues that Sargon's conquest itself caused
the collapse of trade by destroying cities and disrupting what had
till then been "an inter-networked world-economy, once extending
from the Aegean to the Indus Valley." In other words, as with the
end of the Roman empire, the collapse of trade caused the collapse
of civilization more than the other way around.

... “Educational systems could be improved by acknowledging that, in general, boys and girls are different,” said University of Missouri biologist David Geary in their statement. “For example, in trying to close the sex gap in math scores, the reading gap was left behind. Now, our study has found that the difference between girls’ and boys’ reading scores was three times larger than the sex difference in math scores. Girls’ higher scores in reading could lead to advantages in admissions to certain university programs, such as marketing, journalism or literature, and subsequently careers in those fields. Boys lower reading scores could correlate to problems in any career, since reading is essential in most jobs.”

Generally, when conditions are good, the math gap increases and the reading gap decreases and when conditions are bad the math gap decreases and the reading gap increases. This pattern remained consistent within nations as well as among them, according to the work by Geary and Gijsbert Stoet of the University of Leeds that included testing performance data from 1.5 million 15-year-olds in 75 nations. ...

... Two rival reform movements arose to restore the integrity of
Catholicism. Those in the first movement, the Donatists, believed the
church needed to purify itself and return to its core identity. ...

... In the fourth century, another revival movement arose, embraced by
Augustine, who was Bishop of Hippo. The problem with the Donatists,
Augustine argued, is that they are too static. They try to seal off an
ark to ride out the storm, but they end up sealing themselves in. They
cut themselves off from new circumstances and growth.

Augustine, as his magisterial biographer Peter Brown puts it, “was
deeply preoccupied by the idea of the basic unity of the human race.” He
reacted against any effort to divide people between those within the
church and those permanently outside. ....

16. A great piece by someone who considers them unaffiliated with any religion. Every Christian and congregation needs to reflect on the insignificance of the church in this writers life. His tribe is growing: The significant insignificance of religion

Issue 104 examines the impact of automation on Europe and America and the varying responses of the church to the problems that developed. Topics examined are mission work, the rise of the Social Gospel, the impact of papal pronouncements, the Methodist phenomenon, Christian capitalists, attempts at communal living and much more.

"Despite the tough economy, many of the nation’s largest churches are
thriving, with increased offerings and plans to hire more staff, a new
survey shows.

Just 3 percent of churches with 2,000 or more attendance
surveyed by Leadership Network, a Dallas-based church think tank, said
they were affected “very negatively” by the economy in recent years.
Close to half — 47 percent — said they were affected “somewhat
negatively,” but one-third said they were not affected at all. ..."

... It's not surprising that younger entrepreneurial firms are considered more innovative. After all, they are born from a new idea, and survive by finding creative ways to make that idea commercially viable. Larger, well-rooted companies however have just as much motivation to be innovative — and, as Scott Anthony has argued, they have even more resources to invest in new ventures. So why doesn't innovation thrive in mature organizations? ...

... First, he says, the focus of an established firm is to execute an existing business model — to make sure it operates efficiently and satisfies customers. In contrast, the main job of a start-up is to search for a workable business model, to find the right match between customer needs and what the company can profitably offer. In other words in a start-up, innovation is not just about implementing a creative idea, but rather the search for a way to turn some aspect of that idea into something that customers are willing to pay for. ...

... discovering a new business model is inherently risky, and is far more likely to fail than to succeed ...

... Finally, Blank notes that the people who are best suited to search for new business models and conduct iterative experiments usually are not the same managers who succeed at running existing business units. ...

5. A fascinating, if sobering, look at the conflict over islands off the coast of East Asia. Trouble at sea

"President Barack Obama's proposed tilt of U.S. priorities toward the Pacific – and away from the historical link to Europe – represents one of the most encouraging aspects of his foreign policy. Although welcome, we should recognize that this shift comes about three decades too late and that it may miss the rising geopolitical centrality of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The emergence of these longtime historically impoverished backwaters has been largely missed as American policy-makers and businesses are now obsessed with the challenges and opportunities posed by the emergence of China and, to a lesser extent, India. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, over the past decade has produced six of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies. Through 2011-15, according to the International Monetary Fund, seven of the fastest-growing countries will be African, and Africa as a whole will surpass the slowing growth rates in Asia, particularly China.

This growth has caused the region's poverty rates, still unacceptably high, to fall from 56.5 percent in 1990 to 47 percent today. Further growth will likely push poverty levels down further."

8. New Geography also asks, Is the Family Finished? Some interesting thoughts about the impact of declining birthrates in the U.S.

With more than half the population of many U.S. cities who are
multicultural and Hispanics comprising more and more of the
U.S. population, when does it become meaningless and redundant to
execute marketing strategy that is directed to a general market and a
Latino market perceived to be homogenous?

"It is an easy call if you are either (a) a strict libertarian or (b) an
enthusiastic advocate of the less fortunate with limited concern about
the scarcity of resources. (If you belong to both of those groups,
there is little advice that I can offer.) However, in between those
poles of opinion, things become rather murky, rather quickly."

... Comparing the Democrat and Republican participants turned up differences in two brain regions: the right amygdala and the left posterior insula. Republicans showed more activity than Democrats in the right amygdala when making a risky decision. This brain region is important for processing fear, risk and reward.

Meanwhile, Democrats showed more activity in the left posterior insula, a portion of the brain responsible for processing emotions, particularly visceral emotional cues from the body. The particular region of the insula that showed the heightened activity has also been linked with "theory of mind," or the ability to understand what others might be thinking. ...

... The functional differences did mesh well with political beliefs,
however. The researchers were able to predict a person's political
party by looking at their brain function 82.9 percent of the time. In
comparison, knowing the structure of these regions predicts party
correctly 71 percent of the time, and knowing someone's parents'
political affiliation can tell you theirs 69.5 percent of the time, the
researchers wrote. ...

STERLING, Va. - Perched by a computer monitor wedged between shelves of cough drops and the pharmacy in a bustling Walmart, Mohamed Khader taps out answers to questions such as how often he eats vegetables, whether anyone in his family has diabetes and his age.

He tests his eyesight, weighs himself and checks his blood pressure as a middle-aged couple watches at the blue-and-white SoloHealth station advertising "free health screenings." ...

... As Americans gain coverage under the federal health law, putting increased demand on primary care doctors and spurring interest in cheaper, more convenient care, unmanned kiosks like these may be part of what their manufacturer bills as a "self-service healthcare revolution." ...

Recent developments in the field of nanotechnology might give new
meaning to the phrase “nothing gold can stay.” Atoms and bonds developed
not by Mother Nature, but by scientists, are gaining momentum as the
building blocks for cutting-edge materials.

Using nanoparticles as “atoms” and DNA as “bonds,” Chad Mirkin, the
director of Northwestern University’s International Institute for
Nanotechnology, is constructing his very own periodic table. So far Mirkin has built more than 200 distinct crystal structures with 17 different particle arrangements. ...

"The Easterlin paradox suggest that in terms of human happiness -- a
squishy concept to be sure -- there is a limit to economic growth beyond
which there really is just no point in attaining more wealth. Further, a
decoupling between income and happiness at some threshold would imply
that GDP would not be a good measure of welfare, we would need some
other metric.

A recent paper (PDF) by Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers argues that the Easterlin paradox is also wrong. ..."

"In those days, most people were farmers, for whom literacy’s costs
generally outweighed its benefits. However, in an urbanized society
with skilled occupations, literacy pays off. As urbanization gradually
increased in the late Middle Ages, Jews came to fill high-skilled
occupations. Botticini and Eckstein argue that literacy, rather than
persecution, is what led Jews into these occupations."

"But while progressives would clearly mock this policy [trickle-down economics], modern day
urbanism often resembles nothing so much as trickle-down economics,
though this time mostly advocated by those who would self-identify as
being from the left. The idea is that through investments catering to
the fickle and mobile educated elite and the high end businesses that
employ and entertain them, cities can be rejuvenated in a way that
somehow magically benefits everybody and is socially fair."

“Capitalism is the greatest creation humanity has done for social cooperation. It has lifted humanity out of the dirt. In statistics we discovered when we were researching the book, about 200 years ago when capitalism was created, 85% of the people alive lived on $1 a day. Today, that number is 16%. Still too high, but capitalism is wiping out poverty across the world. 200 years ago illiteracy rates were 90%. Today, they are down to about 14%. 200 years ago the average lifespan was 30. Today it is 68 across the world, 78 in the States, and almost 82 in Japan. This is due to business. This is due to capitalism. And it doesn’t get credit for it. Most of the time, business is portrayed by its enemies as selfish and greedy and exploitative, yet it’s the greatest value creator in the world.”

9. Economist Gavin Kennedy with some interesting thoughts on the relationship between the state and the economy in developing nations:

The problem is to achieve the right balance between a competitive market economy and an effective state: markets where possible; the state where necessary.

"... What a sweet picture this conjures: the stay-at-home dad nurturing his
children, looking after the house and helping support his wife in her
budding career and shelving his own big ambitions for later. Now it gets
a little awkward. There is no adorable kid, nor plans to have one. No
starter home that needs knocking into shape. I'm not just doing this
temporarily until I find something meaningful to do. I’m
actually a full-time homemaker ... not stay-at-home dad but stay-at-home
dude. A conversational pause. Where do you mentally file this guy?
Usually I just change the subject. ..."

A new study shows that high-earning women are more likely to let their houses be messy than to hire a housekeeper or get their husbands and kids to pitch in. ...

... "You can purchase substitutes for your own time, you can get your husband to do more, or you can all just do less," Killewald says. "Whether women outsource housework in particular has less to do with resources, but whether or not paid labor is viewed as an appropriate strategy for undertaking domestic work.

In particular, researchers found that 40% of people say they would avoid someone who unfriended them on Facebook, while 50% say they would not avoid a person who unfriended them. Women were more likely than men to avoid someone who unfriended them, the researchers found.

... Libraries are responding to the decline of print in a variety of creative ways, trying to remain relevant – especially to younger people – by embracing the new technology. Many, such as New York’s Queens Public Library, are reinventing themselves as centers for classes, job training, and simply hanging out. In one radical example, a new $1.5 million library scheduled to open in San Antonio, Texas, this fall will be completely book-free, with its collection housed exclusively on tablets, laptops, and e-readers. “Think of an Apple store,” the Bexar County judge who is leading the effort told NPR. It’s a flashy and seductive package.

But libraries are about more than just e-readers or any other media, as important as those things are. They are about more than just buildings such as the grand edifices erected by Carnegie money, or the sleek and controversial new design for the New York Public Library’s central branch. They are also about human beings and their relationships, specifically, the relationship between librarians and patrons. And that is the relationship that the foundation created by Microsoft co-founder’s Paul G. Allen is seeking to build in a recent round of grants to libraries in the Pacific Northwest. ...

3-D printers can produce gun parts, aircraft wings, food and a lot more,
but this new 3-D printed product may be the craziest thing yet: human
embryonic stem cells. Using stem cells as the "ink" in a 3-D printer,
researchers in Scotland hope to eventually build 3-D printed organs and
tissues. A team at Heriot-Watt University used a specially designed
valve-based technique to deposit whole, live cells onto a surface in a
specific pattern.

Feb 02, 2013

Today is the day our advanced technological culture turns to a cute furry rodent in Pennsylvania for a weather forecast. (The only thing a groundhog foretells in my yard is that I'm probably going to need some new landscaping.) Happy Groundhog Day!

"In the course of our strategic planning work with clients, we've
identified the things that make the difference between visions that fall
flat and those that turn on. Here's a no-nonsense summary of those
elements that you can use as a guide when you develop your strategic
plan."

"In this way a conception of subsidiarity “from below” is focused on the location of sovereignty from the “bottom up” rather than on the delegation of authority from the “top down.” We see these variegated approaches to subsidiarity and sovereignty work out in diverse ways in later centuries. It is with these different lenses of subsidiarity “from above” and “from below” that we can better understand the developments of the Roman Catholic principle of subsidiarity as such and the neo-Calvinist articulation of “sphere sovereignty” in the late nineteenth century and beyond."

"Pally’s essay is framed around the thesis that these evangelicals have “left the right.” But left it for what? What she describes is really another vision of conservatism: church-based charity in lieu of a government safety net; exemptions from government regulation for religious groups; federal funding of religious activities; and persistent sexual puritanism. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say they’ve left the radical right and are in the process of creating a new religious right, stripped of harsh rhetoric but still undergirded by conservative ideology. Which is a movement worth chronicling, but not, as Pally intimates, as the new saviors of civility in our religiously-inflected politics."

"In the past scientists have warned that up to five per cent of species are at risk of dying-out as a result of climate change, deforestation and development.

But a new analysis by the University of New Zealand found that this figure was five times greater than reality because the number of animals living in the wild in the first place had been over estimated."

10. I've written before that fear is not an effective motivator for long term change. This is particularly true for some climate change and environmental activism. You need to make new behaviors fun and engaging. WWF appears to have taken this strategy to heart. (Hard to go wrong with anthropomorphized critters but maybe they should consider the article immediately above.)

From the time of Charles Darwin science has painted a picture of our earliest ancestor in the image of a chimpanzee. Scientific American editor Katherine Harmon explains how new fossil evidence is redrawing the lines of human evolution.

Actually, I think we already know who our first ancestor was.

12. For the most part (with a few exceptions), when it comes to movies, if you can't tell your story in less than two hours, then I think you didn't edit the movie well. Hollywood would apparently beg to differ. Why Movies Today Are Longer Than Ever Before

"The average of the highest-grossing films from 20 years ago is 118.4 minutes compared to this year's 141.6 minutes."

Jan 29, 2013

Our species can’t seem to escape big data. We have more data inputs, storage, and computing resources than ever, so Homo sapiens naturally does what it has always done when given new tools: It goes even bigger, higher, and bolder.

We did it in buildings and now we’re doing it in data. Sure, big data is a powerful lens — some would even argue a liberating one — for looking at our world. Despite its limitations and requirements, crunching big numbers can help us learn a lot about ourselves.

But no matter how big that data is or what insights we glean from it,
it is still just a snapshot: a moment in time. That’s why I think we
need to stop getting stuck only on big data and start thinking about long data.

By “long” data, I mean datasets that have massive historical sweep —
taking you from the dawn of civilization to the present day. The kinds
of datasets you see in Michael Kremer’s “Population growth and technological change: one million BC to 1990,” which provides an economic model tied to the world’s population data for a million years; or in Tertius Chandler’s Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth,
which contains an exhaustive dataset of city populations over
millennia. These datasets can humble us and inspire wonder, but they
also hold tremendous potential for learning about ourselves.

Because as beautiful as a snapshot is, how much richer is a moving
picture, one that allows us to see how processes and interactions unfold
over time? ...

... Why does the time dimension matter if we’re only interested in
current or future phenomena? Because many of the things that affect us
today and will affect us tomorrow have changed slowly over time: sometimes over the course of a single lifetime, and sometimes over generations or even eons.

Datasets of long timescales not only help us understand how the world
is changing, but how we, as humans, are changing it — without this
awareness, we fall victim to shifting baseline
syndrome. This is the tendency to shift our “baseline,” or what is
considered “normal” — blinding us to shifts that occur across
generations (since the generation we are born into is taken to be the
norm). ...

I strongly resonate with this article. Trends and trajectories over extended
periods of time are often far more useful than details of the latest twist or
turn in societal development. It is so easy to get lost in the challenges of
the moment. When you stand back and look at our moment in time from the
standpoint of centuries and millennia, we are living in the most astounding age
of human flourishing in the history of the planet. We are never without
challenges but there is good reason to expect that flourishing will improve in
coming generations.

The two groups I find the most insufferable are youth who believe their latest
insights are the magic solution that brings utopia and grumpy old curmudgeons
who mope about, complaining the world is going to hell in a hand basket.
Neither has a sense of the longue durée. We
need to spend less time with journalists and more time with historians.

A great example of the human impact of math is the financial crisis. Black Scholes, number 17 on this list, is a derivative pricing equation that played a role.

"It’s actually a fairly simple equation, mathematically speaking," Professor Stewart told Business Insider. "What caused trouble was the complexity of the system the mathematics was intended to model."

Numbers have power. In this case, people depended on a theoretical equation too seriously and overreached its assumptions.

Without the equations on this list, we wouldn't have GPS, computers, passenger jets, or countless inventions in between.

The Pythagorean Theorem

What does it mean: You can multiply numbers by adding related numbers.

History: Attributed to Pythagoras, it isn't certain
that he first proved it. The first clear proof came from Euclid, and it
is possible the concept was known 1000 years before Pythoragas by the
Babylonians.

Importance: The equation is at the core of geometry,
links it with algebra, and is the foundation of trigonometry. Without
it, accurate surveying, mapmaking, and navigation would be impossible.

Modern use: Triangulation is used to this day to pinpoint relative location for GPS navigation.

Jan 21, 2013

Martin Luther King Day honors the slain civil rights leader Martin
Luther King Jr. In the 50s and 60s King, a black Southern reverend who
advocated nonviolent, peaceful resistance, became the voice of the civil
rights movement. King was assassinated in 1968, though his legacy
ensured his place in history as an American hero.

In August 2011,
the Martin Luther King Memorial opened in Washington D.C. Along with the
passage the the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, the memorial serves as a permanent reminder of
King's work. Test your knowledge of one of America's greatest men in
this quiz.

Jan 05, 2013

"... Although the number of evangelical churches in the United States
declined for many years, the trend reversed in 2006, with more new
churches opening each year since, according to the Leadership Network’s
most recent surveys. This wave of “church planting” has been highest
among nondenominational pastors, free to experiment outside traditional
hierarchies.

“I hear a lot of pastors say, ‘I’m not just trying to be creative and
avant-garde, I think this is maybe the last chance for me,’ ” said Doug Pagitt, the founder of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis.

Mr. Pagitt has written several books on church innovations, many of which were first developed in the “emergent” church movement of the last decade or among “missional” churches whose practices focus on life outside the church.

Many of their innovations are being adopted by an increasing number of pastors in the mainstream.

... But in March, unbeknown to Ms. Pu, a critical meeting had occurred between Foxconn’s top executives and a high-ranking Apple official. The companies had committed themselves to a series of wide-ranging reforms. Foxconn, China’s largest private employer, pledged to sharply curtail workers’ hours and significantly increase wages — reforms that, if fully carried out next year as planned, could create a ripple effect that benefits tens of millions of workers across the electronics industry, employment experts say.

Other reforms were more personal. Protective foam sprouted on low stairwell ceilings inside factories. Automatic shut-off devices appeared on whirring machines. Ms. Pu got her chair. This autumn, she even heard that some workers had received cushioned seats.

The changes also extend to California, where Apple is based. Apple, the electronics industry’s behemoth, in the last year has tripled its corporate social responsibility staff, has re-evaluated how it works with manufacturers, has asked competitors to help curb excessive overtime in China and has reached out to advocacy groups it once rebuffed.

Executives at companies like Hewlett-Packard and Intel say those shifts have convinced many electronics companies that they must also overhaul how they interact with foreign plants and workers — often at a cost to their bottom lines, though, analysts say, probably not so much as to affect consumer prices. As Apple and Foxconn became fodder for “Saturday Night Live” and questions during presidential debates, device designers and manufacturers concluded the industry’s reputation was at risk. ...

"...Launched in July, the Seattle-based Egraphs' business model is simple, but pretty clever. Fans can peruse the company website to see if their favorite athlete has partnered up with Egraphs. Each player's section has a number of professionally shot action photographs included, typically priced between $25 and $50. The fan pays and sends the athlete a message through the website, including some personal details or memories.

The athlete then receives that message on his custom iPad app, using the the information provided to write a personalized note and electronic autograph on the selected photo. The photo is then sent electronically to the fan, who can save it digitally, share it on social media or order a physical print. Revenue is split between company and athlete. ..."

8. This month is the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling, legalizing abortion across the country. Time magazine has a feature article about the Pro-Choice movement this week that suggests 1973 may have been the high-water mark for the movement. Unfortunately, the article is behind a pay wall. Here is a short clip summarizing their take.

"...Academic Publishers will tell you that creating modern textbooks is an expensive, labor-intensive process that demands charging high prices. But as Kevin Carey noted in a recent Slate piece, the industry also shares some of the dysfunctions that help drive up the cost of healthcare spending. Just as doctors prescribe prescription drugs they'll never have to pay for, college professors often assign titles with little consideration of cost. Students, like patients worried about their health, don't have much choice to pay up, lest they risk their grades. Meanwhile, Carey illustrates how publishers have done just about everything within their power to prop up their profits, from bundling textbooks with software that forces students to buy new editions instead of cheaper used copies, to suing a low-cost textbook start-ups over flimsy copyright claims. ..."

"... The first kind of Christianity avoids reactionary authoritarianism
but is often a therapeutic or vanilla mush that fails to ask anything of
anybody out of fear of giving offense. The second kind of Christianity
offers stern, clear moral directives that attract people seeking the
“specific instruction, even confrontation that calls us to grow in
discipleship” (p. 6), but disastrously embraces right-wing ideology and
baptizes that as the content of Christianity.

Both of these versions of Christianity are so deeply flawed, says
Stassen, that both are contributing to the alarming spread of secularism
in the U.S. The first version of Christianity is so thin as to lack any
particular reason why one would want to get out of bed on Sunday and go
to church; the second is so reactionary as to drive thoughtful people
into an anti-religious posture if they conclude that religion equals
right-wing authoritarianism.

I believe this is a stark but actually quite accurate depiction of
the primary problems afflicting the Protestantisms of the left and of
the right in the current U.S. setting. ..."

"While not exclusive to Latin America, the culture of family, support,
and living a life to spend time with your family, I think, is an
important part of Latin American culture that keeps people positive.
Being with those close to you and finding other friends and partners
that value that way of life is a key part of Latin American culture.
That might be the main reason why people remain positive: they are never
truly alone. Interestingly, many discussions and documentaries about
immigrant groups in the United States
show an internal conflict among many who move to the US and who do not
wish to lose their support systems in a new culture rooted in
individualism. While being motivated and entrepreneurial is valued, a
life being with your family, where you are never truly alone, is the
basis for many cultures in many parts of the world. Many new Americans
frown on the thought that children can detach themselves from their
family at 18 years of age. They believe people can only truly thrive as a
family."

"A Pew Internet Research Center survey released Thursday found that the
percentage of Americans aged 16 and older who read an e-book grew from
16 percent in 2011 to 23 percent this year. Readers of traditional books
dropped from 72 percent to 67 percent. Overall, those reading books of
any kind dropped from 78 percent to 75 percent, a shift Pew called
statistically insignificant."

Puerto Rico, Vermont, and Rhode Island are the only states (and territory) that saw a net decrease in population over the year.

The fastest growing region was the South (1.06% population growth) followed by the West (1.03% population growth).

North Dakota and the District of Columbia had the highest population growth, with 2.5% and 2.3% population growth, respectively. Texas, Wyoming, and Utah also saw major growth.

West Virginia and Maine are the only two states where people are dying faster than they are being born, with 0.93 and 0.99 births for each death.

Utah (3.44) and Alaska (3.33) had the highest birth to death ratio in 2012. That means 3.44 babies were born for each death in Utah.

Domestic migration determines the rate that people leave and enter states to and from other states. Per capita, more natives left New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island to move somewhere else than any other states.

On the other hand, people flocked to North Dakota, D.C., Wyoming and South Carolina.

The states that had the highest rates of international migration — that is, the rate of immigrants coming in — were Hawaii, New Jersey, Florida, New York and D.C.

Puerto Rico is seeing a massive exodus — 1% of their population left last year.

"In other words, Americans are increasingly likely to have to purchase
and replace these goods some time soon as they get more and more worn
out. That's bullish for spending, jobs, and the economy as a whole."

"... Yet a few differences between the sexes do seem to hold up to scrutiny. One is spatial abilities. If men look at an object, for example, they are slightly faster at guessing what it would look like if it were rotated 180 degrees. There are plenty of women who do better than individual men. But overall there’s a stasticially significant difference in their average performance. This kind of difference carries over from one culture to another. It’s even detectable in babies. ...

... Whenever we reflect on human evolution, it pays to compare our species to other animals. And in the case of spatial abilities, the comparison is fascinating. Almost a century ago, the psychologist Helen Hubbet found that male rats could get through a maze faster than females. The difference can also be found in a number of other species. ...

... Clint and his colleagues propose a different explanation: male spatial ability is not an adaptation so much as a side effect. Males produce testosterone as they develop, and the hormone has a clear benefit in terms of reproduction, increasing male fertility. But testosterone also happens to produce a lot of side effects, including male pattern baldness and an increased chance of developing acne. It would be absurd to say acne was an adaptation favored by natural selection. The same goes for the male edge in spatial ability, Clint and his colleagues argue. They note that when male rats are castrated, they do worse at navigating a maze; when they are given shots of testosterone, they regain their skill. ..."

Dec 26, 2012

My 2nd Great Grandfather was William Cotton Holmes (1837-1932). He signed up with Union forces in 1862 and served until the end of the war in 1865. Late in 1862 he was stationed in Washington, DC, where he remained for the rest of the war. His brother Hoarce Holmes (1840-1864) (pictured) also served in the Civil War.

Below is a letter written by Horace to William on December 26, 1862, 150 years ago today. It includes a description of being shot and his experience in a hospital. He died less than two years later of smallpox in a DC hospital. I think the orginal is gone but I've transcribed this from a copy my grandmother typed up from the original years ago. Enjoy.

Foster’s General Hospital.

Newbern, N.C., Dec. 26, 1862

My Dear Brother William:

I think I see you start as you read the heading above. Well I am now
in the hospital with a ball through my left shoulder received at the
battle of Kinston, an account of which and the march prior to it, I will
give briefly. First saying, that I have great cause of thankfulness
that my live was spared. The ball struck the top of my shoulder hitting
the bone and glancing, came out of my back about 6 inches below. So
although you may not think much of a wound in the back, I have one and
in the front too. It is luck that the ball went clear through and
providential that it did not go nearer my neck, for if it had gone one
half inch nearer, it would have shattered my shoulder.

So while you have been sitting in the associations and guarding
depots, I have endured long marches, slept on the soft ground at night,
waded through swaps, drank stagnant water by the road and called it
good, ate hard tack and salt horse with a decided relish. Have seen the
time when I would have paid for a hard bread. Have been in the thickest
of the fight and felt the sting of a rebel bullet, heard the whistling
of 10,000 bullets, the shrieking of shells and the crashing of trees by
solid shot, witnessed the inhumanity of shoulder doctors, enjoyed the
beauty of jolting in a baggage wagon, with a swearing driver, after
being wounded, etc. etc.

Your letters of the 6th and the 18th I am much pleased to
acknowledge, and then state that it was about four o’clock in the
morning of Thursday December 11, when the drums of the 45th aroused the
regiment to prepare for new and untried scenes, securing a cup of coffee
so hastily as to burn our tongues, we stood in line in light marching
order. You know what that is, after a few miles. The moon was looking
kindly down bur soon all nature was warped in a dense fog. The sunrise
gun belched forth its grim welcome, just as we reached the City of
Newbern, the streets of which were filled with baggage wagons and
battery on battery of artillery, showing that the expedition was a big
one. We were delayed sometime near Fort Foster and then the word was
forward and on we went. The sun had now got up and shown pretty hot. The
road led us through swaps and creeks, at one of which we were so long
passing that the right of the regiment got far ahead and the left
straggled all the forenoon. This was very hard marching, as we had to
hurry to try to catch up, and the sun was so hot that it started the
sweat. At noon, the regiment halted for an hour, when we all got
together and ate our dinner, after which the colonel formed us in
sections, with orders to go through everything, and through we went, mud
and water, giving our extremities the benefit of a water bath. I liked
this marching better than in the morning, as it was more regular. Just
after sunset, we caught the first glimpse of the glimmering camp fire of
the advanced and it rejoiced our eyes. We soon filed in, stacked arms,
and after tearing the fence down for our fires, we prepared to rest. We
were tied, I tell you, 20 miles they say. I dried and exchanged my
stockings, soaked my feet, spread my blankets and dropped to sleep quick
and slept well too. Our cavalry had a skirmish here, taking a few
prisoners. In a ravine ahead, the rebels felled large tress to obstruct
our passage, and we can now hear the ring of the axes of the pioneers as
they remove them. The immense filed looks fine with its numerous fires.
The next morning, Friday, at four, we were called up and after
breakfast we were soon in line loading and capping our rifles, which the
boys thought indicated work. At sunrise we started and soon passed
through the swamp where the rebs tried but failed to stop us. There is
not scenery here. It is all swap and pines. This morning we passed a few
houses bearing the white flag. Nothing like a village through the whole
march. The houses are near a mile apart. Towards noon we passed a few
rebels prisoners, and further on one dead. They are cadaverous looking
fellows in gray. Our cavalry had a skirmish with the rebs ahead routing
them. At noon we stopped for dinner, where it occurred, and where lay a
dead horse. We had a fine rest here and I turned swapped my socks and
greased my feet and then fell in and marched along. Skirmishes are
thrown out on either side, and we passed [Page 2] through prisoners and
houses. The roads are bad and the artillery gets stuck giving us
frequent rests, sometimes stopping us in the middle of a huge mud
puddle. But when we march we go fast through the blackest swap. At night
we were stopped for an hour in the midst of a huge swap. It was a place
where we might have been slaughtered like sheep, but no foe was near
and soon we heard the welcome forward and we went at an astonishing
pace. It was dark as Eqypt and we splashed along through the mire, tired
Oh! It was near ten o’clock when we got to camp, and just as we entered
we heard several picket shots and feared we should be disturbed, but
no. I was glad to make my bed and sleep.

Saturday stiff and tired, I joined the line (Ah, you imagine me at
the rear of the company, do you?) No sir, not an inch have I lost
through the whole march. The road was ever wet and muddy. About ten, we
were resting, when we were started by the report of the cannon, which
brought every man to his feet and we pushed on rapidly. Soon after the
orders came "Open right and left", and the heavy artillery of the rear
came thundering by. We could still hear the firing. It was splendid to
see the rush of the artillery as they dashed along. At last the firing
ceased, and about noon, we were file in battle array in a large open
filed. My heart jumped as I was certain of a fight. We remained sometime
and I got a nap. We were very tired as we had marched rapidly. Soon the
order came for us to camp and we were glad. The firing was occasioned
by the rebs placing a battery in one corner of the field, and our folks
shelled them out, capturing their guns. We rested here all the P.M. and
Eve. Our rations were low but soon the quartermaster came up and we here
supplied with three days rations of hard tack and coffee and I made a
very good pot of the latter and it relished well. We were furnished with
20 extra pounds of ammunition to lighten us, you know. There has been a
great deal of straggling in the march, more from the old regiments,
however, than the new. Sunday morning found us in line. Sad scenes that
sun will look upon and today usually so quite is to be disturbed by the
roar of battle. We were soon on the march with roads bas as ever and
marched very rapidly. We passed a cannon taken from the rebs and the
dead by the road side. It was sad. Along side of the road there was
large quantities of brush out as though the Rebs intended to plant
batteries, but had no time.

After a rapid and fatiguing march we were resting in a huge puddle of
water, when at 10 of 10 we heard the first gun of the battle of
Kingston. The boys were speaking and comparing the scenes with that at
home. It was a most peaceful morning and all nature seemed in repose.
The firing still continued and we were pushed rapidly forward, and were
halted about a mile from the battle field near a house which was
afterwards used as a hospital and where I spent some weary hours. While
here, the firing in the front kept up vigorously and the artillery from
the rear came thundering by while squads of prisoners were carried to
the side. Soon we were ordered forward and soon we were to see what
stuff we were made of. No one flinched but on we went to find the enemy,
who were posted in a large house and entrechments in the rear of the
thickest of swaps in which they had some troops, but when we drove out,
we, the 45th, were filed from the road into the open field where our
batteries were posted, then through the wood, thence into the swamp, and
such a swamp, so thick with briars, and mud, up to our middle every
step. The shot and shell were flying thick around us killing some poor
fellows at the first entrance. We marched to the right flank, our
company being the third from the left. As soon as we got in, we deployed
as well as possible to the left. The bullets now fell like hail, but we
could not see a Reb as we were in a hollow in the water. Often we were
ordered to lie down in the face of the Rebs’ fire where the woods were
not quite so thick. The bullets whistled fearfully above, around and
over us every where. I had fired several times and was just raising my
rifle for another when I felt a sensation in my shoulder and my rifle
and myself [Page 3] went earthward. I fell to the rear in doing which I
was a little fearful of a shot in the back. I had one bullet hit the top
of my cap, leaving a dent. Hailing one of my comrades, helped me out
without any casualty. Our boys fought well and drove the rebels from
their position and across the bridge which they tried to burn, but we
were too quick and stopped them. The 10th Co. charged upon them and
drove them like sheep. We occupied Kinston that night and recrossed the
river, burning the bridge and going on to Goldsboro I limped away
towards the hospital which I at last reached. It was already quite full
with sufferers and a number were constantly arriving. It was painful to
hear their groans. After waiting about 2 hours, the doctor came and
cutting away my clothes, found that the ball had entered the top of my
shoulder and come out of my back about six inches below. It was a very
narrow escape and the Dr. assured me that I had just saved my bacon. I
have a great cause to be thankful that it is no worse. Wet and weary I
waited until night fall, when I was conducted to a bed of corn husks on
the floor of the chamber. There were 12 of us in the room, and there was
pain there. I was glad to get my wet things off and try to sleep and
think of home. The house is owned by an old Reb who is bitter against
the use of his home. We stayed there until Friday noon as comfortable as
could be expected. The Dr. Mason was very kind and did much for our
comfort. Friday noon we were put aboard a baggage wagon and jolted six
miles to take the gun boat. Our army had done its work and was returning
and the boat was to take the wounded. When we got there, they wouldn’t
let us go aboard because we could use our legs. We were told to join the
column in the baggage wagon. We were put aboard with a swearing kind of
a fellow, who cared not for God or man. This was tough and I was heart
sick, but there was no help and on I went. Till far into the eve we
drove and not very slow and every rough place going through me. At last
we reached camp and no place to sleep. The driver swore that we should
not sleep in the wagon, and those that were only sore on foot get out,
and I and another with a ball in his arm made special pleading and
remained, but it was a hard cold bed with nothing under us and a light
quilt over us. Oh, so cold. At four o’clock next morning, we commenced
our ride and all day we jolted until 8½ in the evening, when I arrived
at Newbern. Arriving I searched for a hospital and lighted on this one,
where I was well taken care of. Beds were good that night. This is a
very good hospital and I am getting on first rate and can thank God that
I have been preserved. In battle I felt no fear. I put my trust in God,
and was calm. You will see from accounts what our forces did, being all
victories. I shall never spoil for a fight and do not wish to see
another one. I am sorry for Mother. How she will worry! I sent a letter
by the first mail and one since. Strange rumors reach us from
Washington. Is it strange that soldiers are discouraged? But pluck it. I
remain your brother, Horace.

Dec 17, 2012

The
horrific massacre in Newton, Connecticut, is to sparking debate about
guns and violence, as well it should. As the discussion gets underway, I
think it is helpful to get a sense of where we stand in the flow of history as
it relates to violence in the United States. Here are a few
things to consider.

Below is data
from the most recent FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR). The annual report compiles
reported crimes. It strength is the use of hard data. Its biggest weakness is the
absence of unreported crime. The willingness of people to report crime varies
by type of crime and their willingness to report may change over time. Also, law enforcement’s diligence with
different types of crime may change over time. Tougher enforcement can lead to fewer
incidents of actual crime, even as incidents
of reported crime rise. Nevertheless,
the UCR is an important measure.

A second
measure is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Twice a year, surveys ask members of households if they have been victims of particular crimes, reported or
not. The strength of the survey is that it captures unreported crime. A
weakness may be that some crimes, like domestic violence, are underreported.

The NCVS
is also broken into two categories:

Violent - rape, robbery, and assault.

Property
- burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft.

(A
different methodology was used in 2006 that makes it incomparable with other
years. Also, 2011 data has been published and shows an uptick in crime.
However, the 2002 and 2010 data in the recent report, used as comparison points, do
not match earlier publications and I have yet to determine why. I chose not to
include it here until I have a better understanding.)

An
interesting question: Was there truly less crime fifty years ago or were people
simply less likely to report crimes? I doubt there is a definitive answer. Murder
is sometimes used as a proxy for overall violence in society. Here is the United States murder
rate per 100,000 population:

Additionally,
there is this estimation of the murder rate over the last 300 years. (Source: The Public
Intellectual)

The
lowest murder rate ever was 4.6 in 1963. It was 4.7 in 2011.

It can conclusively
be said that that violence in American society is not spiraling out of control.
We are living in one of the least violent eras in
American history. But this is not the
whole story.

The 4.7
homicide rate for the United States is a near record low but it is still two or
three times the rate of other Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development nations. Guns are a big part of this difference. The good news is
the precipitous decline in aggravated deaths. The bad news is how much more violence there is in
the United States compared to other nations, even at all-time lows.

… And
yet those who study mass shootings say they are not becoming more common.

"There
is no pattern, there is no increase," says criminologist James Allen Fox
of Boston's Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since
the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices.

The
random mass shootings that get the most media attention are the rarest, Fox
says. Most people who die of bullet wounds knew the identity of their killer. …

… Grant
Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has
written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings
rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And
mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He
estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first
decade of the century.

Chances
of being killed in a mass shooting, he says, are probably no greater than being
struck by lightning.

Still,
he understands the public perception - and extensive media coverage - when mass
shootings occur in places like malls and schools. "There is this feeling
that could have been me. It makes it so much more frightening." …

(I realize
that does not seem to square with the statement about mass shootings peaking in 1929. I suspect a typo and "1999" was what was intended.)

This
data was reported in March of 2010. According to a recent Los Angeles Times
article, Deadliest
U.S. mass shootings, there have been nine mass shootings in the United
States in the first three years of this decade. That projects out to thirty for this decade. But there have been five mass shootings in the last five months.
There clearly has been an uptick in mass shootings over the past year.

On
a final note, the Sandy Hook massacre involved young children at school. Over
the past twenty years, the number of children 5-18 years old murdered at school
has ranged from a low of 14 (school years ending in 2000 and in 2001) and a
high of 34 (schools years ending 1993 and in 1998.) (Source: Indicators of School Safety: 2011) According to an article in the Guardian, Mass
shootings at schools and universities in the US – timeline, over the last fifty years there have been
six school mass shootings (including Sandy Hook) that have taken the lives of
children 5-18. Three of the mass shootings were at primary schools (Stockton, CA,
in 1989; Nickel Mines, PA, 2006; and now Sandy Hook.)

So
here are a few observations and comments:

The United States has an excessively violent culture.

Violence has lessened significantly in recent years. We are not spiraling into
chaos.

Guns are an important factor in the excessive homicide rates. I don't know why citizens need to own semi-automatic weapons. But there is more
than access to these guns that needs to be addressed here.

While a case can be made that mass murders have been declining in the long run,
the sudden frequency of them in recent months is alarming (five in five months).

Nothing that is said above should take away from our outrage at the senseless
death of innocent children and their teachers. But Friday’s shooting should not
send us into despair that things are spiraling out of control. Friday’s
shooting should motivate us to ask anew how we can accelerate our march toward
becoming a less violent society.

Dec 12, 2012

The digitisation of the world’s books reveals how the popularity of English words and phrases has evolved since the 16th century. And the Top 100 lists for each year are now free to browse online.

The digitisation of the world’s books reveals how the popularity of
English words and phrases has evolved since the 16th century. And the
database is now freely browsable online.

Last year, the
Google Books team released some 4 per cent of all the books ever written
as a corpus of digitised text, an event that has triggered something of
a revolution in the study of trends in human thought. The corpus
consists of 5 million books and over 500 billion words (361 billion in
English) dating from the 1500s to the present day.

In a single
stroke, this data gives researchers a way to examine a whole range of
hitherto inaccessible phenomena. Since then a steady stream of new
results has emerged on everything from the evolution of grammar and the
adoption of technology to the pursuit of fame and the role of
censorship. ...

Doc Holiday uses an expression "I'm your Huckleberry," in the movie Tombstone. Basically he was saying, "I'm game." I had never heard that expression befor the movie. I entered that term at the first mention in the books appears to be in 1880. The events depicted in the movie were in 1881. Interesting!

"... Drawing on data from the [Harvard] university's library collections, the animation
below maps the number and location of printed works by year. Watch it
full screen in HD to see cities light up as the years scroll by in the
lower left corner. ..."

4. There is a U-shaped happiness curve, consistent across cultures, that shows happiness declines from childhood until about our mid-forties and then begins to improve as me grow old. It appears it may hold true in primates as well. Our ability to discount bad news, even when we shouldn't, follows the same U-shaped curve. Our brains and experience are optimal for discerning bad news in middle-age. Turns out that ignorance (or maybe denial) truly is bliss. Viewpoint: How happiness changes with age. On a related note, it appears that Elderly Brains Have Trouble Recognizing Untrustworthy Faces.

5. The holiday season is in full swing and many people falsely believe this a time of elevated suicide rates. Actually, spring and summer have the highest rates and Nov - Jan have the lowest. In 2010, July was highest and December was lowest. Holiday suicide myth persists, research says

"Michael" was in the top 3 names for boys from 1953-2010. It dropped to sixth last year. Want to know how your name ranks for each year since 1880? Go to the Social Security Online's Popular Baby Names. The Baby Name Wizard is also pretty cool.

"For the first time in Barbie’s more than 50-year history, Mattel
is introducing a Barbie construction set that underscores a huge shift
in the marketplace. Fathers are doing more of the family shopping just
as girls are being encouraged more than ever by hypervigilant parents to
play with toys (as boys already do) that develop math and science
skills early on.

It’s a combination that not only has Barbie building luxury mansions —
they are pink, of course — but Lego promoting a line of pastel
construction toys called Friends that is an early Christmas season hit.
The Mega Bloks Barbie Build ’n Style line, available next week, has both
girls — and their fathers — in mind.

“Once it’s in the home, dads would very much be able to join in this
play that otherwise they might feel is not their territory,” said Dr.
Maureen O’Brien, a psychologist who consulted on the new Barbie set...."

And this reminds me of last year, or the year before, when cooking sets were becoming big with boys. They've been watching Emeril Lagasse on the Food Network. "Bam!" New merchandising angle.

"Scientists have designed an energy-efficient light of plastic packed with nanomaterials that glow. The shatterproof FIPEL technology can be molded into almost any shape, but still needs to prove it's commercially viable."

"... Last month, at the first ever conference of the Sustainable
Nanotechnology Organization in Washington DC, Michail Roco of the
National Science Foundation, and architect of the U.S. National
Nanotechnology Initiative provided a response. He said, “every
industrial sector is unsustainable…and nanotechnology holds the promise
of making every one of them sustainable.”

It’s my belief that that is true: nanotechnology, or the ability to
manipulate matter at a scale of one billionth of a meter, has
far-reaching implications for the improvement of sustainable technology,
industry and society.

Already, it is being used widely to enable more sustainable
practices. Safer manufacturing, less waste generation, reusable
materials, more efficient energy technologies, better water
purification, lower toxicity and environmental impacts from chemotherapy
agents to marine paints are all current applications of nanotechnology.
There is no reason for this technology to develop in an unsustainable
manner.

In the past, a lack of foresight has resulted in costs to society – people, businesses, and governments, and—
that could have been avoided by proactive efforts to manage risks.
Today, the tools to develop safer technologies and less harmful products
exist. Let us not miss this opportunity. ..."

"It used be that news of death spread through phone calls, and before
that, letters and house calls. The departed were publicly remembered via
memorials on street corners, newspaper obituaries and flowers at grave
sites. To some degree, this is still the case. But increasingly, the
announcements and subsequent mourning occur on social media. Facebook,
with 1 billion detailed, self-submitted user profiles, was created to
connect the living. But it has become the world's largest site of
memorials for the dead."

20. From the "That's just not right!" file. Harvard Economics Department does their version of "Call me maybe."

"What if all objects were interconnected and started to sense their
surroundings and communicate with each other? The Internet of Things
(IoT) will have that sort of ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M)
connectivity. Since there are estimates that between 50 billion to 500 billion devices will have a mobile connection to the cloud by 2020, here’s a glimpse of our possible future.

Your alarm clock signals the lights to come on in your bedroom; the
lights tell the heated tiles in your bathroom to kick on so your feet
are not cold when you go to shower. The shower tells your coffee pot to
start brewing. Your smartphone checks the weather and tells you to wear
your gray suit since RFID tags on your clothes confirm that your
favorite black suit is not in your closet but at the dry cleaners. After
you pour a cup of java, the mug alerts your medication that you have a
drink in-hand and your pill bottle begins to glow and beep as a reminder.
Your pill bottle confirms that you took your medicine and wirelessly
adds this info to your medical file at the doctor’s office; it will also
text the pharmacy for a refill if you are running low.

Your smart TV
automatically comes on with your favorite news channel while you eat
breakfast and browse your tablet for online news. After you’ve eaten,
while you are brushing your teeth, your dishwasher texts your smartphone
to fire up your vehicle via the remote start. Because your “smart” car can talk to other cars and the road, it knows what streets to avoid due to early morning traffic jams. Your phone notifies you
that your route to work has been changed to save you time. And you no
longer need to look for a place to park, since your smartphone reserved
one of the RFID parking spaces marked as "open" and available in the cloud.
Don’t worry about your smart house because as you exited it, the doors
locked, the lights went off, and the temperature was adjusted to save
energy and money.

Does it sound too farfetched for 2020? It shouldn’t since a good part of that is in the works now. ..."

4. Speaking of computers, technology lovers will appreciate that the World’s Oldest Computer Gets a Reboot.

"The Congressional Budget Office has a new study
of effective federal marginal tax rates for low and moderate income
workers (those below 450 percent of the poverty line). The study looks
at the effects of income taxes, payroll taxes, and SNAP (the program
formerly known as Food Stamps). The bottom line is that the
average household now faces an effective marginal tax rate of 30
percent. In 2014, after various temporary tax provisions have expired
and the newly passed health insurance subsidies go into effect,
the average effective marginal tax rate will rise to 35 percent.

What struck me is how close these marginal tax rates are to the marginal
tax rates at the top of the income distribution. This means that we
could repeal all these taxes and transfer programs, replace them with a
flat tax along with a universal lump-sum grant, and achieve
approximately the same overall degree of progressivity."

7. What are the conservative streams and thinkers that are likely to influence the evolving future of conservatism in the United States. David Brooks has some interesting insights into The Conservative Future.

Nov 23, 2012

Paul Solman: It being Thanksgiving, we give today's post to Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony, built by pious Protestant purists backed by profit-seeking investors.

Bradford tells the story of the tough Massachusetts winter of 1623 and how the colony barely survived, unable to raise enough food to sustain themselves. One reason he gave: the rules of the colony, as laid down by the investors, specified that the colonists should till their land in common, as was the case in the England from which they migrated.

But the colony, perhaps desperate, seems to have changed the rules in order to jack up productivity, allowing individual families to tend plots on their own, an early instance of the benefits of pursuing self-interest as opposed to communalism.

I am on record: successful economic grand strategy entails a balance between cooperation and self-interest. Extremes in one direction or the other are unsustainable. According to Governor Bradford, extreme communalism wasn't doing the job in Plymouth, Massachusetts ca. 1623. ...

Nov 22, 2012

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and provoke their aggressions, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict; while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people. I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United Stated States to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.

In
a national online longitudinal survey, participants reported their
attitudes and behaviors in response to the recently implemented metered
paywall by the New York Times. Previously free online content now
requires a digital subscription to access beyond a small free monthly
allotment. Participants were surveyed shortly after the paywall was
announced and again 11 weeks after it was implemented to understand how
they would react and adapt to this change. Most readers planned not to
pay and ultimately did not. Instead, they devalued the newspaper,
visited its Web site less frequently, and used loopholes, particularly
those who thought the paywall would lead to inequality. Results of an
experimental justification manipulation revealed that framing the
paywall in terms of financial necessity moderately increased support and
willingness to pay. Framing the paywall in terms of a profit motive
proved to be a noncompelling justification, sharply decreasing both
support and willingness to pay. Results suggest that people react
negatively to paying for previously free content, but change can be
facilitated with compelling justifications that emphasize fairness.

... Beyond the United States, global statistics point undeniably toward
progress in achieving greater peace and stability. There are fewer wars
now than at any time in decades. The number of people killed as a result
of armed violence worldwide is plunging as well — down to about 526,000
in 2011 from about 740,000 in 2008, according to the United Nations. ...

... Most top Pentagon officials say the statistics showing that the world is
safer are irrelevant and don’t reflect the magnitude of the risks. The
result is what Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, has dubbed a “security paradox.” The world may seem safer,
Dempsey says, but the potential for global catastrophe has grown as the
planet has become more interconnected and potential enemies have greater
access to more powerful weapons and technology. ...

9. How much difference is there in the coming of age experience between Baby Boomers and Millennials? Mother and daughter team Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig are interviewed about their new book: What’s the Matter With Millennials?

"The online startup Kaggle assembles
a diverse group of people from around the world to work on tough
problems submitted by organizations. The company runs data science
competitions, where the goal is to arrive at a better prediction than
the submitting organization's starting 'baseline' prediction. Results
from these contests are striking in a couple ways. For one thing,
improvements over the baseline are usually substantial. In one case,
Allstate submitted a dataset of vehicle characteristics and asked the
Kaggle community to predict which of them would have later personal
liability claims filed against them. The contest lasted approximately
three months, and drew in more than 100 contestants. The winning
prediction was more than 270% better than the insurance company's
baseline.

Another interesting fact is that the majority of Kaggle contests are
won by people who are marginal to the domain of the challenge — who, for
example, made the best prediction about hospital readmission rates
despite having no experience in health care — and so would not have been
consulted as part of any traditional search for solutions. In many
cases, these demonstrably capable and successful data scientists
acquired their expertise in new and decidedly digital ways"

5. The New Republic has a very lengthy article The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It offers some interesting insights in to Mormonism's road from communalism to economic individualism, a trajectory followed by many Protestant sectarian movements. Jackson Lears writes:

"Mormons embraced economic individualism and hierarchical communalism;
they distrusted government interventions in business life but not in
moral life; they used their personal morality to underwrite their
monetary success. They celebrated endless progress through Promethean
striving. They paid little attention to introspection and much to
correct behavior. And their fundamental scripture confirmed that America
was God’s New Israel and the Mormons His Chosen People. It would be
hard to find an outlook more suited to the political culture of the
post–Reagan Republican Party."

"A number of students asked foreign policy questions, and then a young woman asked me about the responses I have received to my Atlantic cover story from this past summer, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."
I answered, and several other young women followed up. After ten
minutes or so, I saw that the roughly 50 percent guys in the room had
gone completely silent. When I commented on the suddenly one-sided
nature of the conversation, one young man volunteered that he "had been
raised in a strong feminist household" and considered himself to be
fully supportive of male-female equality, but he was reluctant to say
anything for fear he would be misunderstood. A number of the other guys
around the table nodded in agreement."

8. People who know me personally know I tend to use sarcasm and double entendre in spoken communication. One of my biggest blogging challenges is editing most of this out of posts. Emoticons can help but some of the biggest misunderstandings I have had came from people not being able to see my wink or big grin as I write certain things. For that reason, I found this interesting: The Strange Science Of Translating Sarcasm Online

"In their new book "Religion and AIDS in Africa" (Oxford University Press), sociologists Jenny Trinitapoli and Alexander Weinreb seek to challenge the widespread view that religious beliefs and communities have unwittingly assisted in the spread of the disease through their resistance to preventative sex education. They also show that not only have religious groups had a largely positive role in AIDS prevention, but also how the epidemic has shaped religious beliefs in unexpected ways."

Oct 27, 2012

Each week I spend considerable time scanning headlines as I look for stories to blog about at the Kruse Kronicle. I clip them into an Evernote Notebook and usually twice a day I select one or two to link and discuss. A number of interesting stories never make it on to the blog.

So this week I'm beginning what I hope will be a regular Saturday feature. Each Saturday I will post links I did not use the previous week. For now I will call it "Saturday Links." Happy clicking!

3. Icon of the American Libertarian movement, Murray Rothbard, once asked, "Why won't the left acknowledge the difference between deserving poor and
undeserving poor. Why support the feckless, lazy & irresponsible?" Chris Dillow gives a libertarian response affirming the need to Support the undeserving poor.

"I can easily imagine my graph in a Julian Simon or Steven Pinker chapter
on human progress and the decline in violence. Even though I have no
philosophical objection to the death penalty, it's hard not to interpret
this 400-year pattern as a strong sign of human betterment."

Oct 15, 2012

On average, the Biblical world sees a startling new discovery of
allegedly cosmic significance every four or five years. Most recently,
we had Jesus's Wife, with the Gospel of Judas not long before that, and
no great powers of prophecy are needed to tell that other similar finds
will shortly be upon us.

In themselves, the finds are usually interesting (if they happen to
be authentic), but where the media always go wrong in reporting them is
in vastly exaggerating just how novel and ground-breaking they are.

So powerful are such claims, and so consistent, that it sometimes
seems as if nobody before the 1970s (say) could have known about the
multiple alternative Christianities that flourished in the first
centuries of Christianity. Surely, we think, earlier generations could
never have imagined the world revealed by such ancient texts as the Gospel of Thomas,
and the Gnostic documents that turned up at Nag Hammadi. Lacking such
evidence, how could older scholars have dreamed what we know to be true
today: the vision of Jesus as a Zen-like mystic teacher, or perhaps a
Buddhist-style enlightener, who expounded secret doctrines to leading
female disciples, and who may even have been sexually involved with one
or more of them? Today, for the first time, we hear the heretics
speaking in their own voices!

But here's the problem. Virtually nothing in that model would have
surprised a reasonably well-informed reader in 1930, or even in 1900,
never mind in later years. In order to make their finds more appealing,
more marketable, scholars and journalists have to work systematically to
obscure that earlier knowledge, to pretend that it never existed. In
order to create the maximum impact, the media depend on a constructed
amnesia, a wholly fictitious picture of the supposed ignorance of
earlier decades. ...

... People being what they are, I know that situation won't change any
time soon. But can I at least make a minimum demand? If you are going to
claim a new gospel fragment as a revolutionary scholarly breakthrough,
can you at least demonstrate that it significantly advances the state of
knowledge beyond what existed in the era of Herbert Hoover?

Sep 21, 2012

1) If the Great Recession is measured according to how far the economy
had fallen below potential GDP, it is actually quite similar to the
effects of the double-dip recession in the early 1980s.

2) If the Great Recession is measured by the size of the drop, relative
to potential GDP, it is about 9 percentage points of GDP (from an actual
GDP 1 percent above potential GDP to an actual GDP that is 8 percent
below potential GDP). The total size of this drop isn't all that
different--although the timing is different--from the years around the
double-dip recession of the 1980s, the years around the recession of
1973-75, and the recession of 1969-1970.

3) The recovery from the early 1980s recessions was V-shaped, while the
recovery from the Great Recession is more gradual. But this change isn't
new. The recoveries from all the recessions before the early 1980s were
reasonably V-shapes, and the recoveries after the 1990-91 and 2001
recessions were more U-shaped, as well.

Sep 19, 2012

Here's a finding that would have made for great occupy sign last
year: American income inequality may be more severe today than it was
way back in 1774 -- even if you factor in slavery.

That stat's not
actually as crazy (or demoralizing) as it sounds, but it might upend
some of the old wisdom about our country's economic heritage. The
conclusion comes to us from an newly updated study by
professors Peter Lindert of the University of California - Davis and
Jeffrey Williamson of Harvard. Scraping together data from an array of
historical resources, the duo have written a fascinating exploration of
early American incomes, arguing that, on the eve of the Revolutionary
War, wealth was distributed more evenly across the 13 colonies than
anywhere else in the world that we have record of.

Suffice to say, times have changed. ...

... We are much richer nation, and much better
off today, than 240 years ago. In the 1770s, America was a heavily
agrarian country of yeoman farmers, merchants, and tradesmen, with an
economy that accounted to just a few billion dollars in present values.
Like India or Russia today,
both of which technically enjoy more income equality than the United
States, early Americans were relatively poor compared to us. They were
just relatively poor together. The first wave of industrialization in
the 19th century increased living standards, but also offered bigger
rewards to factory owners than their workers. That pattern neatly fits
our classic understanding of what's supposed to happen when economies
move from farming to manufacturing. And by now, we've gone through
several epic rounds of economic upheaval that have left us with a vast
gulf between the rich and the rest, as well as a welfare state that
tries to mitigate some of the side effects of that difference.

So,
awful as it might sound, the fact that the United States is less
economically egalitarian than during its rural, slave-society ancestors
is not inherently a reason to fret. ...

Sep 17, 2012

Gavin Kennedy offers observations in response to a piece by Peter Foster in the Financial Times about Smith's two famous uses of the "invisible hand" metaphor, once in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and in the Wealth of Nations. Read Kennedy's whole post for more context.

... In Moral
Sentiments, Smith was not glibly crediting “the rich” with “spread[ing] the
wealth despite themselves”. The
plain fact was that the “proud and unfeeling landlords” had absolutely no
choice but to share their crops with the landless labourers as their sole source
of basic subsistence because without food neither the labourers nor their families would survive a week
– they had no other source of sustenance – and without food the labourers could
not work and their families would not grow up to replace them, and the
landlords would also starve. It was this dependence on their labourers which
“led” them to order that they be fed, metaphorically expressed as the landlords
being led by an invisible hand”. Moreover, given that agriculture, upon which
societies depended and had done so since it was introduced 11,000 years ago as
humans left the forests, their distributions of food, which had continued
through many regimes, mostly tyrannical, were managed by the landlords’
overseers, not noted for their humanity.
Of the accumulated wealth of the rich – basic conveniences and dressage
of their castles – next to nothing was shared with the poor.

In Wealth Of
Nations, the blanket term, “businessmen” also hides an important point made by
Smith, namely the fact that he was referring to the specific case of some, but
not all merchants, who were characterised by their felt insecurity for the fate
of their capital if they sent it abroad.
Instead, this sub-set of all businessmen, were “led” by that insecurity,
metaphorically expressed as “an invisible hand” – insecurity in the man’s head
could not be seen, i.e., it was “invisible” – to do what they chose to do out
of their fears. By so doing,
unintentionally they were led to add to the arithmetical size of national
“revenue and employment”, which was a public good.

In both cases, the
immediate cause of their doing a public good (the propagation of the species
and an addition to the arithmetical total of “revenue and employment”) was
metaphorically described by Smith as them being “led by an invisible
hand”. He made no claims to nosense
that there was an actual “invisible hand” present and working miraculously in
“markets”, through “supply and demand”, the “price system”, “general
equilibrium”, or any of the other nonsense wromgly in his name. ...

... Smith also taught
how self-interested individuals could act in disregard of the consequences of
their actions, for which he gives over 80 examples in Wealth Of Nations, which
did not add to the public good.
Self-interest also led merchants to favour tariffs, prohibitions, and
‘jealousy of trade’ ...

Sep 12, 2012

Nima Sanandaji has written an interesting paper about Sweden.
It largely points to the same historical facts that I have mentioned in
my previous writings, namely that Sweden during its most free market
oriented era, from 1870 to 1950, had the highest rate of per capita
economic growth in the world. After massive tax and spending increases
during the 1950s and 1960s, Sweden stopped outperforming other
countries, and after a dramatic leftist shift in economic policies
implemented by Socialist Olof Palme
after he became prime minister in 1969, Sweden started to seriously
lagg other countries. However, free market reforms implemented in the
1990s, and in recent years, have enabled Sweden to once again outperform
other Western countries in growth.

He also discusses possible cultural factors, and also points out that
Sweden in 1920 had a relatively low level of economic inequality,
despite the fact that government spending and taxation at that time was
only 10% of GDP.

Scandinavian societies have developed a unique culture with a strong work ethic and strong ethical attitudes regarding the claiming of welfare benefits. There are also high levels of trust and social cohesion. This social capital, which was built up before the advent of the modern welfare state, has played an important role in the success of Scandinavian countries.

For many decades, this pre-existing culture, allowed countries such as Sweden to have extensive welfare systems without the social difficulties, rise in worklessness and other effects that many would have predicted. Scandinavian countries have also reaped the rewards of relatively free market policies in some areas of economic life to reach impressive levels of wealth creation.

To characterise the Swedish model either as a social democratic utopia or a failed socialist experiment is a mistake. Sweden is a successful country in terms of having a low poverty rate and long life expectancy. However, these factors have much to do with non-government facets of Swedish society that pre-existed the welfare state.

As Milton Friedman has previously noted, the millions of US residents of Swedish descent also display low rates of poverty. They combine this with a living standard that is significantly better compared with Swedes living in Sweden. The transformation of Sweden from an impoverished agrarian society to a modern industrialised nation is a rarely mentioned, but quite significant, example of the role of free markets in lifting a country out of poverty and into prosperity. Low levels of inequality and low levels of government spending characterised this period of economic transformation. The golden age of Swedish entrepreneurship - when one successful firm after another was founded in this small country and gained international renown – occurred at a time when taxes and the scope of government were quite limited.

Sweden shifted to radical social democratic policies in the 1960s and 1970s, with a gradual reversal beginning in the mid 1980s. The social democratic period was not successful, as it led to much lower entrepreneurship, the crowding out of private sector job production and an erosion of previously strong work and benefit norms. The move towards high taxes, relatively generous government benefits and a regulated labour market preceded a situation in which Swedish society has had difficulty integrating even highly-educated immigrants, and where a fifth of the population of working age are supported by various forms of government welfare payments.

It is also important to remember that Sweden, like other Scandinavian nations, has compensated for policies of high taxes and welfare benefits by improving economic liberty in other fields. Some reforms, such as the partial privatisation of the mandatory pensions system and voucher systems in schools and healthcare surpass reforms in most developed nations. Since these reforms, and the reduction in taxes from the very-high levels of the 1970s to mid 1980s, Swedish relative economic performance has improved.

Swedish society is not necessarily moving away from the idea of a welfare state, but continual reforms are being implemented that increase economic liberty and incentives for work within the scope of the welfare system. Such trends are also visible in Finland and Denmark, with only oil-rich Norway being an exception.

Sep 04, 2012

Well,
why are Americans so gloomy, fearful and even panicked about the
current economic slump? U.S. consumers seem suddenly disillusioned with
the American Dream of rising prosperity. Hard times are forcing some
people to turn their back on the American Dream.

"Whining"
hardly captures the extent of the gloom Americans feel as the current
downturn. The slump is the longest, if not the deepest, since the Great
Depression. Traumatized by layoffs that have cost million of jobs during
the slump, U.S. consumers have fallen into their deepest funk in
years.

While
some economists have described the current slump as a near depression,
that phrase overstates the case if it is taken as a comparison with the
period 1929-33, when the U.S. economy contracted by nearly a third. The D
word becomes more valid, especially with a small d, when it is used to
compare the growth rate of the 1930s, which averaged 0.5% a year, with
the expected sluggishness of the next decade, which some economists
predict will see an average growth rate of 2%.

"I'm
worried if my kids can earn a decent living and buy a house," says Tony
Lentini, vice president of Mitchell Energy in Houston. "I wonder if
this will be the first generation that didn't do better than their
parents. There's a genuine feeling that the country has gotten way off
track, and neither political party has any answers. Americans don't see
any solutions."

The
deeper tremors emanate from the kind of change that occurs only once
every few decades. America is going through a historic transition from a
heedless borrow-and-spend society to one that stresses savings and
investment. When this recession is over, America will not simply go back
to business as usual.

The
underlying change in the way American consumers and business leaders
think about saving and spending will make the recovery one of the
slowest in history and the next decade one of lowered expectations. Many
economists agree that the U.S. will face at least several years of very
modest growth as consumers and companies work off the vast debt they
assumed in the last decade. ...

Jun 27, 2012

In 1943, four local newspapers published a New York City Market Analysis. Largely forgotten in the 70 years since, the document provides an amazing window into New York's neighborhoods of that era.

The 250-page Market Analysis provides hundreds of photos & color-coded maps, statistics, and short narratives about neighborhoods across the city. The statistics and maps are based on the 1940 Census, providing a rich complement to the individual 1940 Census records that are available online.

In 1943, four local newspapers published a New York City Market Analysis. Largely forgotten in the 70 years since, the document provides an amazing window into New York's neighborhoods of that era.

The 250-page Market Analysis provides hundreds of photos & color-coded maps, statistics, and short narratives about neighborhoods across the city. The statistics and maps are based on the 1940 Census, providing a rich complement to the individual 1940 Census records that are available online.